New Grub Street

In the literary London of the 1880s, two writers take opposite roads through a marketplace that has turned authorship into a business. Edwin Reardon is a novelist of real but fragile gift, too conscientious to write anything he does not believe in, and watching his admired talent fail to pay the rent. Jasper Milvain has little creative genius but perfect clarity: he understands that “literature nowadays is a trade,” and he means to succeed at it — reviewing, networking, and writing precisely what the market will buy.

Around them turns a world caught in the same machine: Amy Reardon, who loved her husband's promise and is broken by its poverty; Marian Yule, who does the anonymous drudgery that keeps her embittered father in print, and whose love for Milvain founders on a shrinking legacy; Harold Biffen, who starves for an uncompromising art no one will read. As Reardon sinks toward failure and Milvain climbs toward comfort, Gissing refuses every easy verdict — asking whether the idealist's integrity is courage or weakness, and whether the cynic, who says aloud what everyone knows, is actually wrong.

First published in 1891 and drawn from Gissing's own years on the edge of destitution, New Grub Street is widely regarded as the great novel of the writing life. Unsentimental, clear-eyed, and devastating, it anatomises art and commerce, poverty, and the price of integrity with an honesty that comforting accounts of the artist leave out — a book as alive to the age of the freelancer as to the age of the three-volume novel.

This edition pairs the complete text with an editor's foreword on the novel's composition, technique, and meaning, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.